Back to School Poster

Back to School (1986)

Comedy | Sport 
Rayting:   6.6/10 28.4K votes
Country: USA
Language: English
Release date: 19 February 1987

To help his discouraged son get through college, a funloving and obnoxious rich businessman decides to enter the school as a student himself.

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utgard14 3 July 2014

Self-made millionaire Thornton Melon (Rodney Dangerfield) enrolls in college to help his son (Keith Gordon), who's having trouble fitting in. Doesn't take long before Thornton is the big man on campus, which doesn't sit well with everybody. Very funny comedy that never gets old. The cast is wonderful. Rodney Dangerfield is hilarious and his one-liners come one after the other. His best starring role, for sure. Sam Kinison is a riot. Loved every scene he was in. A young Robert Downey, Jr. is also lots of fun. Not for those who overthink their movies. This is for people who like to have fun and laugh. They got Kurt Vonnegut to appear in this! How cool is that? An '80s classic you have to see.

jfwilder 19 August 2005

Fmovies: This is as classic (though campy) as Rodney gets. I just had to comment ahead of time that any remake of this, especially one involving Cedric the Entertainer, cannot possibly live up to the original.

I'm really tired of Hollywood trying to win over the hip-hoppy, shallow culture by instilling Cedrick the Entertainer in this remake-to-be when the original was done by a classic entertainer. What's next...a remake of Animal House with P-Diddy as Bluto (or whatever he calls himself these days)? Rodney is already turning over in his grave knowing how bad the remake is going to be. Somewhere up there I hope he can convince God to strike the set with thunderous bolts of lightning and 14 inch hailstones. Can't Hollywood leave well enough alone? Rodney, now that you're dead....they give you even less respect!

drednm 16 December 2005

Rodney Dangerfield's best film and finest hour (or 2)... He plays a crass self-made millionaire whose son is away at college. After divorcing the second wife--a shrew (Adrienne Barbeau)--he drops in on the kid (Keith Gordon) to discover the kid is not if a fraternity or on the diving team. The kid wants to drop out so Rodney decides to go BACK TO SCHOOL to encourage the kid. Great premise.

Of course Rodney becomes a free-spending, beer-swilling college frosh to the delight of the student body and school administration. Rodney spews and almost unending barrage of jokes and one-liners and is hysterically funny. But beyond the crass character, this is one time when Dangerfield also shows some acting chops and some sweetness to his character. And it works! Top supporting cast helps out a lot too. Sally Kellerman is the English prof. Paxton Whitehead is the snotty business teacher. Robert Downey is the bizarro roomie. Ned Beatty plays Dean Martin. William Zabka is the obnoxious rival. Terry Farrell is the too-tall girl friend. Burt Young plays Lou the bodyguard. Edie McClurg is the secretary. Sam Kinison is the shell-shocked history prof. Severn Darden is the lab guy. M. Emmett Walsh is the diving coach. Jason Hervey is Dangerfield as a kid. And Danny Elfman appears as his Oingo Boingo self and scored the film.

The diving finale is hysterically funny and the perfect ending for this sweet and funny movie.

jtindahouse 7 April 2005

Back to School fmovies. Without Rodney Dangerfield this movie would be in the bottom 100 for sure. However with Rodney Dangerfield (in my opinion) it should be considered for the top 75 comedies of all time.

Lines like "I like teachers. If you do something wrong they make you do it again" are what carry this movie. There's not a lot of them but when they do pop-up they're hilarious.

I do believe the director and producers made a mistake not taking Jim Carrey on for the role of the History Teacher because he was too young, because it wasn't a believable kind of movie any way. I must say though that the man who did play the History Teacher did a great job and seeing him teaching was one of the best parts of the movie.

So if your into comedies or a Rodney fan don't be put off by how old this movie is like I was because its age, if anything, makes the movie even better.

japamo 14 October 2005

"Back to School" is a cherished member of my VHS collection not only because of the late but inimitably immortal Rodney Dangerfield and his outrageous persona, but also because of its laceration of a favorite satiric target - college. "Back to School" came out in 1986 -a year after I graduated from Tufts University- and it nearly perfectly encapsulates (if slightly exaggerates) and skewers college life during the heedlessly hedonistic and materialistic '80s.

At first Thorton Melon (Rodney's character in the movie) seemingly has two altruistic motives for applying to college: 1) personal improvement, and 2) desire to help his only son Jason (Kevin Gordon) succeed, especially when Thorton discovers that Jason is not exactly the epitome of the BMOC. However, once he essentially bribes his way into college by convincing the venally avaricious Dean Martin (he, he) to let him endow the Thorton Melon school of Business Administration, high school dropout Thorton apparently has it made. One might argue that this scenario is implausible, but given universities' rapacity for more cash, I could believe they would bend the rules to let wealthy Thorton in.

Thorton then proceeds to embody every college student's wet dream - to be the perpetually fun-loving slacker who has the dough to show himself and others an endless good time and buy himself out of any trouble! Again, philistine critics may argue that no college would tolerate Thorton's party-boy person; wouldn't the cops arrest him for the voyeuristic dormitory scene or the out-of-control party scene, instead of reprimanding him or bringing Lite beer (remember Rodney was one of the shills for Lite)? However, "Back to School"'s college satire necessarily must employ a little hyperbole to get its point across.

For example, in the classroom scenes with the history professor (the late Sam Kinison) and the business instructor (Paxton Whitehead), the movie does also go a little over the top but also tweaks college for its well-meaning but unrealistically theoretical approach (i.e. head up its a$$ approach) to working and life. Yeah, especially Thornton's take on the corruption and shady dealing it would really take to start a business really do have a germ of truth. Also, the way Thorton "prepares" for his classes -his secretary takes notes for him in class and his research team does his reports and homework- is off the wall but also possesses scientific veracity. I'm sure at Tufts and other colleges, some students never went to class and got others to take notes and do reports. However, (and this is one of my favorite scenes from the movie) only Thornton would heft a report created by his research team and crack, "I dunno; it feels like a "C"; add some more multicolored graphs"." And of course only Thornton would hire Kurt Vonnegut to appraise his own work.

Nevertheless, "Back to School" lets Rodney collide with harsh, poignant reality without sacrificing laughs. Thornton is failing his classes; even the professor most sympathetic to him (Sally Kellerman) suspects him of plagiarism. His son Jason angrily refuses to let Thornton's think tank do his astronomy work. Thornton will be expelled unless he passes a multi-part oral exam (!) by all of his course professors. After a pep talk from Thornton's chauffeur (Burt Young) about Thornton's "School of Hard Knocks" life, Jason realizes that just as his dad came to school to show him how to

lee_eisenberg 1 June 2006

In what might be the apex of Rodney Dangerfield's career, he plays boorish millionaire Thornton Melon, finally attending college. The movie is really an excuse for Dangerfield to be a complete goof-off, containing every silly thing imaginable. Possibly the best line is Thornton's comment about Longfellow.

As for the other characters, Keith Gordon does OK as Thornton's son Jason, but Robert Downey Jr. is even neater as Jason's ultra-left-wing friend Derek, who even has a theory about the fascism of football. Sally Kellerman, Burt Young, M. Emmet Walsh, Adrienne Barbeau, Ned Beatty, Sam Kinison and Robert Picardo are all pretty good in their roles (there's even an appearance by Kurt Vonnegut). It's just that this is Rodney Dangerfield's movie all the way. I think that it's quite safe to assert that the Man Who Got No Respect will truly be missed.

A hilarious movie.

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